Thank you to all who attended and especially those who performed at our memorial event. It was truly evident how much Mark had inspired and impacted the lives of every person in the room and we are so touched to have been trusted to share your memories and creative responses to losing him. We all look forward to creating many more MED Theatre memories inspired by Mark’s work and all that he taught us.
Mark Beeson (1954 – 2022), MED Theatre’s Founder and Artistic Director,
“Wherever I go I feel your presence – in the wind that breathes over peat and heather, in the rivers that weave their spirit through the pools, in the tender rays of the level sunset…”
From MED Theatre’s ‘Daughters of Sunset’
A playwright and anthropologist who grew up on Dartmoor, Mark read classics at university before switching to human sciences and working as a primate ecologist. He conducted and published research into the history of Dartmoor and its mythology. As a writer, he read his long poem, The Blue Monkeys of Zomba, on BBC Radio 3, had four plays broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and had written a book on Dartmoor for the Countryside Commission.
MED Theatre was born out of the original community plays written and produced by Mark and his friends and family in the early 1980s. The organisation then officially became formally constituted and a registered charity in 1989, with Mark Beeson in the role of Artistic Director over the next three decades. Between 1989 and 2022 Mark wrote over 50 community plays and experimental dance dramas for MED Theatre, built and nurtured our youth and education work and mentored the creation of over 10 short films.
